Artifacts Found (in unexpected places)

How does a leader stand up for his or her vision?

“When you have a vision and someone comes to you with some convoluted idea, you can hold it up to the vision and ask, ‘Does it fit?, Does it fly? If not, don’t bother me.’ A vision must be so strong that it can outweigh the egos of managers that might want to take off in a different direction.”

Inspiration and wisdom sometimes come from surprising places. I was digging around my files and the found that quote from a summary of Nuts! (Southwest Airlines Crazy Recipe for Business and Personal Success) that I wrote in 1997.

Our team is working hard on their 2025 vision. For the first time in 25 years, I am not leading the charge. I don’t like to think of myself as a bystander in this effort, but instead as a coach instead of the quarterback. I don’t have the defense trying to rip my head off. From my comfortable box in the stands, I can see the field, and I have a little more time to think about what’s playing out in front of us. At least, this is how I imagine a coach might be looking at a football game.

From where I am now, I realize more than ever that a vision has to be owned by the person with ultimate responsibility for making it happen. I recognize this much more clearly than I did as the leader on the field, and maybe, just maybe, there are other leaders out there that are confronting a challenge that requires the leader to be at his or her best.

Does our leader need to listen carefully to the input of his team, his colleagues, his coaches? Yes, emphatically yes. Can those voices influence him too much? Again, emphatically yes.

So, here lies another exceptionally difficult balance for a great leader. At what point do you discard what your advisors are telling you and hold steady on the course you wish to set?

This leads me to consider an interesting life lesson I learned in ‘retirement’. One of the things I have always hoped to do is to write a book. I have always loved to write, but could I sit down and bang out 200 relatively interesting and useful pages? The jury is still out about the ‘interesting and useful’ part, but I genuinely loved the writing process, as much as I had hoped I would.

Then came the editing. I was so focused on the daunting task of writing that I completely missed the coming tension of editing. When I got the first feedback, I recognized that I was being confronted with another difficult balancing act, and one with some similarity to the leader’s responsibility to own the vision.

How much of the feedback do I listen to? How do I sift through it and decide what will add to my vision for this work and what needs to be set aside to remain true to my own direction?

I began the journey of writing with a pretty firm idea of what I wanted to do with the book, and what I didn’t want to do. I thought my first draft was great. And then I got the first editorial feedback and faced what the leader faces when considering what others are saying about his or her vision.

My first reaction, honestly, was frustration. I don’t think I was expecting an enthusiastic “it’s perfect!”. I wasn’t expecting to face the hard truth that I had more work to do. I really wanted to think I just hit the Easy Button and it would be all done.

After disappointment and frustration came denial. It IS perfect, they just don’t get it. They don’t see that I’ve got this plan and it’s going to work. What do they know anyway – they’re not sitting in my seat, they can’t see what I see.

Thankfully I recalled my ‘swing thought’ about handling constructive criticism. For the non-golfers out there, a swing thought is a very simple trigger to help you hit the ball well and consistently. You may have seen golfers that have this short backswing before they hit the ball. Or maybe Jason Day closing his eyes and visualizing the shot. It cuts through the static to focus on the positive picture.

My swing thought for criticism is to imagine it hitting a glass pane in front of me. Yeah, it’s goofy, right? I forget where I heard this, but for me it worked. I don’t take criticism well. My self-esteem isn’t that healthy. For whatever reason, imagining the words hitting a glass wall in front of me helps. They stick there for a moment, like a mudpie, then slide away. They don’t stick to me. They’re not me. They’re words, just words, from another human being brave enough to toss them at me.

So, I went back and carefully read through the editorial feedback. And I read the first draft again. And yes, the Introduction was a jumbled mess. It was a rambling journey from one rabbit hole to the next. It didn’t tell the reader what was ahead. It didn’t clearly establish the themes to expect throughout the story ahead. And right there, I could see a giant chunk of text that had “conclusion” written all over it. Wow, that was really helpful!

Other feedback challenged me to decide what this animal really was. In its current state, it could be a lot of different things. The editor helpfully pointed out three things it could be, and there was clearly some preference for what she wanted it to become. In the end though, this is where I had to step in and take back the narrative (excuse the poor pun).

A book, like a vision, is art and science. The science is making it sound, believable, clearly constructed and communicated. The art is what your gut is telling you. It’s how you make it engaging and authentic to you and others. It’s allowing vulnerability to peek though and say hello. It’s creating the magic of telling a story – tapping into something humans have done to connect for millennia.

Which brings me back to that quote from Nuts! that I pulled out of a Word document from 1997.

‘Does it fit?, Does it fly? If not, don’t bother me.’

Whether creating a vision, or writing your first book, those are pretty good words to have in front of you if you are going to create a compelling and clearly constructed story.

A vision that takes into account every bit of feedback will not be an identifiable animal. And it won’t be authentically a work of the leader. Instead, it becomes a collage of other people’s ideas that doesn’t quite hang together. There might be something in there for everyone; however, there probably won’t be the one clear thing in there that unites everyone and inspires you.

One of the main reasons to have a vision is to act as a filter for the many things you do not want to do. Visioning is powerful because it gives us all a moment to step off the daily treadmill of ‘can’ts’ and, just for a few moments, consider the infinite potential of the ‘cans’. For this reason though, it can create chaos, tension, and potentially, inertia.

If we can be anything at all, if there are hundreds of forks in the road in front of us, how do we decide which one to take?

This is where the leader works his or her art. At some point, the chaos has to be tamped down, like turning down the gas on the fireplace. Let the logs continue to burn but don’t put more on the fire. Ease the infinite potential down to a few forks. Listen then, to your passion. Which way feels right and why. If it’s ‘because I said so’, step back and listen again.

A vision must be so strong that it can outweigh the egos of managers that might want to take off in a different direction.”

For my own sake, I choose to substitute ‘passionate ideas’ over ‘egos’ in that quote to keep it more positive. Our team doesn’t have a lot of ‘egos’ (thankfully). Even if politics and egos aren’t driving the distraction, there is still another difficult situation for the leader to navigate here.

You want the strength of a smart and diverse team around you. Nobody is that good alone. What’s very difficult to do is to give credence and respect to the passionate ideas of your team without allowing it to take you off into a direction you feel is wrong. That is especially challenging if you are lacking a bit in your own self-esteem. Leaders often have too little humility to seriously consider input from others; however, some don’t have enough self-confidence to toss out ideas that don’t fit.

Maybe this is where the coach can add value, like a great editor. Not by pointing out the ‘right’ fork to take or telling you how to construct the story, but by asking questions to help the leader listen carefully to that voice inside. Asking questions to help pick up the ideas that appear to fit and discard the ones that turn a duck into a platypus.

Okay, when you use a word like platypus, you know you’re done for the day. Before I leave you, one final thought.

What other ideas might we find by revisiting things that stirred us many years ago, lying dormant in our minds, like a favorite picture stored away in a closet. Or maybe, like finding my dad’s college diploma unceremoniously tossed into a box I found in a closet after he passed away.